Skip to main content

Railway stations to get child protection panels

Stations are a major hub of human trafficking

Known to be major transit points for human trafficking, railway stations will soon get Child Protection Committees (CPCs), as per the standard operating procedure developed by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR).
The committees are being instituted in compliance with a Delhi High Court directive on safeguarding child rights.

The procedure mandates a provision for CPCs, comprising a station manager, superintendent or master, representatives from the Government Railway Police and the Railway Protection Force, a ticket inspector and a section engineer.
“The CPCs at every major railway station will be responsible and authorised to set and ensure the mechanism for care and protection of children at and around railway stations. It will function as a nodal and apex body for provision of all child protection issues at the railway station-level,” said a recent note of the Railway Board.
Instructions have also been issued to establish children assistance centres at railway stations, with a pre-defined provision for food, temporary shelter, clothing, toilet facilities, first-aid and medicines for the children in need.
A woman Railway employee will manage the centre to ensure that girls get proper attention till they are produced before the Child Welfare Committee (CWC). The centre may be managed with the help of non-government organisations.
The Committee, which will be required to hold monthly review meetings, has been made responsible for the upkeep of the assistance centres, arranging emergency support, maintaining emergency contact numbers of stakeholders, monitoring child protection systems, maintaining records of the children and displaying advocacy messages.
It will also coordinate with the CWC and the Juvenile Justice Board, besides ensuring pro-active vigilance on potential child abusers loitering about the stations.
The responsibilities of ticket-checkers have also been outlined; they are to keep a close watch on potential child abusers/traffickers and alert the security personnel accordingly.
The station’s Assistant Manager (Commercial) will be appointed the nodal officer on behalf of the Chairman of the Railway Board.
Railway officials, as part of the unit, will undergo training on issues of child rights and protection.
Several non-government organisations working with victims of child abuse and trafficking have welcomed the initiative, stating that it would help check crimes against minors.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SC asks Centre to strike a balance on Rohingya issue (.hindu)

Supreme Court orally indicates that the government should not deport Rohingya “now” as the Centre prevails over it to not record any such views in its formal order, citing “international ramifications”. The Supreme Court on Friday came close to ordering the government not to deport the Rohingya. It finally settled on merely observing that a balance should be struck between humanitarian concern for the community and the country's national security and economic interests. The court was hearing a bunch of petitions, one filed by persons within the Rohingya community, against a proposed move to deport over 40,000 Rohingya refugees. A three-judge Bench, led by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, began by orally indicating that the government should not deport Rohingya “now”, but the government prevailed on the court to not pass any formal order, citing “international ramifications”. With this, the status quo continues even though the court gave the community liberty to approach i...
3 comments
Click Here To Read more »

"ISRO has capabilities to build geostationary satellites for air quality monitoring” (downtoearth)

Pawan Gupta's findings on trans-boundary movement of pollution (Punjab to Delhi) from biomass burning in 2015 spurred debates. He participated in discussions with Indian regulators early September at the Better Air Quality Conference in Busan on the advantages of using satellite data for air quality monitoring. He explains to Down to Earth how air quality monitoring is done using satellite data. How is satellite data used to measure air pollution? Satellites that provide information on atmospheric pollutants are normally (not always) in the low earth orbits (400-1000 km above the Earth’s surface). A single satellite can carry one or more remote sensing instruments onboard that look down to earth and obtain information about the object in the field of view of satellite sensor. The Earth receives electromagnetic radiation from the sun, which travels through space and reaches the earth-atmosphere system. The radiation then interacts with the Earth’s atmosphere and the surface...
1 comment
Click Here To Read more »

What's ailing Namami Gange programme?(DTE)

Winters are extremely hectic for Sushma Patel, a vegetable grower in Uttar Pradesh’s Chunar town. Her farm is in the fertile plains of Ganga where people grow three crops a year. But this is the only season when she can grow vegetables. And before that, she needs to manually dig out shreds of plastic and wrappers from her one-hectare (ha) farm. “This is all because of the nullah,” she says, pointing at an open drain that runs through her field, carrying sewage from the neighbourhood to the Ganga. “Every monsoon, the drain overflows and inundates the field with a thick, black sludge and plastic debris. We cannot even go near the field as the stench of sewage fills the air,” she says. But Patel has no one to complain to as this is the way of life for most people in this ancient town. About 70 per cent of the people in Chunar depend on toilets that have on-site sanitation, such as septic tanks and pits. In the absence of a proper disposal or management system, people simply dump the faec...
3 comments
Click Here To Read more »